Wow. I’ve finally gotten around to taking Karthik’s recommendation that I try WordPress b/c ‘I’ll never go back’. Now, I haven’t given it a full try just yet - haven’t even made a post. But I will tell you this — the install is CAKE. They tell you on the site that it takes 5 minutes, and they’re really not kidding. If your webhost supports PHP and mysql, all it takes is asking your webhost to create a mysql database for you called ‘wordpress’ and have them tell you the username, password, and host, modify 3 or 4 lines of text in a single file, upload everything to your website, and then just run the install program. I’ve never had a script be so simple to install and run so flawlessly right from the start. I’m already getting excited about some of WordPress’s features, like the ability to customize the list of places to ping, the preinstalled plug-in that you can just click to activate where if someone comes to your site from google, the search terms they used will be hilited on your page, the ability to set up endless categories and choose multiple categories for a post using checkboxes (what a pain it is to have to first select ‘multiple categories’ from the drop down box in TypePad and then ctrl-click to select all of your categories). And I did the install myself (aside from having my hosting company create a database for me) and it was still a snap, whereas the MovableType install looked difficult enough that I asked the techs at my webhost (Carpathia hosting) to do it for me, and they ran into some troubles (of what sort I don’t know) doing it, so it took them a couple of days to close the support ticket and I’d have thought it would have been really easy for them to do it,, given the extent of their technical knowledge. So I’m guessing WordPress is WAY easier to install than MovableType, but since I didn’t do both installation procedures myself I can’t say that for sure….

We’ll soon see how easy it is to post, customize templates, etc. with WordPress cuz that’s next on my list for my tool and hardware review blog

I’ve decided I should create, at it’s most basic level, at least one site with each of the blogging tools. I can then better determine which is easiest to customize, as well as well as which is more feature-rich and easy to use. Then I can provide you folks with a much more informed review of the various blogging tools out there.

Obviously, my TypePad site is my How to Blog weblog that you’re reading right now. Notice how the header is truncated b/c the templates that come with TypePad don’t appear to be rendering correctly in IE6 (update - I decreased the wording in my header so this doesn’t happen because it just looks too unprofessional and I couln’t find another workaround yet). I’m not sure if this is a CSS problem, and since I don’t know much about cascading style sheets yet I haven’t mucked around too much in the TypePad templates to try to fix it. I’ll create a post on how things look in other browsers in the future.

My Movable Type blog is located at Online Travelogues, and is also a work in progress and needs serious modifications to the index page so that it only lists all of the categories and to the individual post pages, so that it doesn’t list the title of all the other posts in the sidebar (which messes up my adsense relevancy).

I’ve been testing out Blogger for my weblog about Red Eared Slider Turtles.

My 1st WordPress blog is going on my Tool Reviews site.

Blosxom and b2evolution blogs are soon to come.

Once I’ve got one of each, I can work more on the tweaking of the templates, etc, to see which will eventually be my blogging tool of choice - and also so I can better understand which features I consider to be most crucial (as mentioned many times already, we already know I can’t go with Blogger because it doesn’t currently support TrackBacks, nor is there any indication that they intend to do so anytime soon).

From http://wordpress.org/docs/installation/different-address/:

WordPress has a number of files and directories it requires to operate. Previously, all these files and directories and your blog home page (index.php) had to be in the same directory. Now with 1.2, you can have your blog index in a different directory than your WordPress files with no problems, and here we explain how.

We’re going to assume two things:

You’ve already installed WordPress at http://example.com/wordpress/
You want your blog home page to be http://example.com/

Without Further Ado

Go to your Options page. It should say your WordPress address and Blog address are the same. Change your Blog address to be http://example.com

Copy the index.php file from the wordpress directory into the root of your site.

Now open up index.php and change the line that says require(’./wp-blog-header.php’); to be require(’./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’);

Open up wp-config-sample.php and fill in your database details. Save and rename the file to wp-config.php.

Finally if you’re using the mod_rewrite option for your blog URIs you’ll need to go to Options › Permalinks to get the new rewrite rules and copy those to a .htaccess file at the root of your site.

Caveats
The only catch is the ‘Edit this’ links will no longer appear by every entry and comment if you’re using this option. This is a limitation of how we’re setting cookies, and this may be fixed in the future.

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Personal note: after reading through these instructions, I’m thinking it may just be easier to install the wordpress files into the root directory of my domain so that I don’t have to deal with the ‘caveats’ and can have full functionality of wordpress whilst still having my Tool Reviews weblog pages appear in the root of my domain. Is this a bad idea??

Note 2: While still very much a work in progress, the Tool Review Site will be where I test out the WordPress platform.

Apparently, if you FTP your site to blogspot instead of using the web interface, you can disable the ads that Blogger puts on your freely hosted site. Another awesome feature about Blogger - free hosting and no ads! Now, if they would only start supporting TrackBack it would be one of my top picks. Without it, though - I still feel Blogger can’t compete with other weblog platforms such as MovableType, etc.

The Blogger Navbar replaces the default ad block formerly inserted on blogspot.com pages with a more useful navigation tool. Navbar features include:

Blogger: takes you back to www.blogger.com.
Search: searches the blog you’re viewing, via Google SiteSearch.
BlogThis!: a popup for quick ‘n easy blogging, further explained in the BlogThis! Help article.
Get Your Own Blog: another link to www.blogger.com.
NextBlog: takes you to a random, recently-updated Blogger blog.
The Navbar appears on all freely-hosted Blog*Spot blogs, but can be disabled for users publishing via FTP. It is available in four colors, and is configured in the Template tab in Blogger’s interface:

Once you’ve made your selection, click Save:

Then Republish your blog:

Notes:

Unless you publish your blog via FTP, the Navbar cannot be disabled. If Google isn’t returning any search results for your blog, it’s probably because your blog hasn’t been indexed yet. Google has a page where you can make sure your blog is in its index.
We’ve made every effort to make sure the Navbar doesn’t interfere with custom template designs. However, some display problems may occur. Here are a few things to try if you are running into trouble:
• add style=’margin-top:40px;’ to the topmost element of your Template. (i.e.

<>

would become

<>

)
• make sure the closing tag is present; it should be go before the tag.